This is the semi-official blog for the Northwest/Forest Park Home Community of Imago Dei Community Church in Portland Oregon.
We meet every Tuesday from 7 - 9 PM.
Please note that, while we're all intelligent, witty and wonderful people, what we write here does not necessarily represent the views of our church as a whole.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

On fear (again)

I was talking about this with my men's group the other night:

A conclusion we reached is that much of fear is generated by free will. As an example: when you were a kid you didn’t have the option of not playing prison dodge ball. It was prison dodge ball week in P.E., so you had to play. Now that we’re older, we can hand-select which activities in which to participate and suddenly we’re terrified of failure.

(insert any of a million different variables for prison dodge ball, i.e. other sports, foods your parents made you eat, etc)

Obviously I’m simplifying it a little; probably you did have some fear of prison dodge ball, but you got over it because you had to. Later in life, you don’t have to. You can choose to stay scared forever.

Makes sense, right? Free will is what brought us original sin, fear is maybe Satan’s greatest weapon…and this is why I think Jesus is always saying “do not be afraid.”

2 comments:

Fear is generated by free will? I'm not so sure I buy that. Unless you just mean that we can choose to be afraid or not be afraid; and even that could be arguable in some cases. Maybe you could elaborate further...